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Elvis Costello is back, and it's like he never left.
Costello's latest album, Brutal Youth, returns to what many of his fans grew to expect from the best of his work with The Attractions — a combination of excellent songsmithing with angry lyrics of penetrating insight about the passing of time and the nature of lost youth.
"London's Brilliant Parade" is an archetype of the album's overall excellence. On the surface, it's a delightful, pretty pop song — making the contrast of its bleak lyric all the more heartbreaking.
"Outside my window / not long before sleep arrives," he opens, setting a pleasant tone that he immediately turns on its head with the next lines: "They come with their sirens / And they sweep away all the boys / Busy draining the joy from their lives."
The chorus fairly drips with cynical irony. "Just look at me," he sings. "I'm having the time of my life / Or something quite like it"
Similarly, album closer "Favourite Hour" is an achingly beautiful ballad, with Costello accompanying himself on piano in a song that would not be out of place in the classical repertoire.
But once again the lyrics add a terrible, sad twist, with dark, deathful images ("Pray for the boy who makes his bed in cold earth and quicklime") about the passing of time — "the tragic waste of brutal youth."
Not that it's all unrelievedly gloomy.
"This Is Hell" offers a wittily cynical, elegantly written analysis of aging, in a song whose darkly whimsical music and vivid lyrics strongly recall "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."
The chorus announces almost cheerily, with a tinkly music-box effect in background, "This is hell... It never gets better or worse," which is echoed in the cartoony vocal style The Beatles used in "Getting Better All The Time" (which also contained the line "Can't get no worse...").
Later, as a percussion effects tick-tocks in the background, Costello offers further details of hell: "'My Favourite Things' are playing again and again / But it's by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane / Endless balmy breezes, in perfect sunsets framed / Vintage wine for breakfast and naked starlets floating in Champagne."
That sounds good, but the problem, he continues, is that " All the passions of your youth are tranquillised and tamed / You may think it looks familiar, though you may know it by another name."
Of course, all the trenchant lyricism would be of little use if the album didn't measure up musically. But it does, in spades. The songs are consistently attractive, and the arrangements — Costello working once again with Attractions bandmates — are simple, hard and focused.
Opener "Pony St." is vintage Elvis, its cynical lyric belied by the sprightly musical bounce and Nick Lowe's fluid bassline.
And Steve Nieve provides nifty keyboard work on "13 Steps Lead Down" and pensive, carefully measured piano behind Costello's heavily reverbed vocal on "Still Too Soon To Know."
The chorus of "Sulky Girl" is a clever adaptation of British pop, and "Rocking Horse Road" features a delicious electric guitar riff under the vocal.
"Clown Strike" is vaguely like Van Morrison — with its coolly swinging uptempo R&B rhythm, Nieve's B3 organ in whole notes underneath, and backing vocals like those in "Jackie Wilson Said."
About the only shortcoming on Brutal Youth is that Costello has, as usual, refrained from including lyrics in the CD package.
The only lyric quoted on the CD liner is from the raucous shouter "20% Amnesia" (which also features a distorted guitar, varying a riff from "I Feel Fine"): "This is all your glorious country thinks of your life," Costello sings. " Strip-jack-naked with a Stanley knife."
But CD is a great medium for Elvis Costello — he can indulge himself with a full complement of 15 songs, and the disc's added capacity allows all of them to be full length ("Sulky Girl" checks in at over five minutes, and only "Still Too Soon To Know" is under three).
And, unlike his unfavorable recollection of his own youth, he doesn't waste a moment here.
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